Why identity is so important to innovation
What it takes to go from knowing to doing
Most of us are taught that you need to know something before you can do it. But the research on how people actually build professional identities suggests the opposite is true. It’s only through doing that we genuinely learn, and it’s through that process that our identity is formed.
Pradita Pradhan is a good example of what that looks like in practice. In 2017, she took an internship at Field Ready Nepal, a humanitarian organisation working on ways to solve Nepal’s notoriously difficult supply chain problems using locally manufactured parts. At Field Ready she found a culture where uncertainty was expected and getting things wrong was part of the process. “I was simultaneously learning and also trying to do the work,” she says. “Even though I had studied engineering in Kathmandu, this was something tangible for me. It turned theory into something real.”
When Field Ready became a partner on one of the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office’s Frontier Tech Hub pilots, Pradita gained access to a wider network of peers and coaches, and the institutional backing of an organisation explicitly designed to support people in trying things that might not work first time. She progressed from intern to Programme Manager and, through the Hub, helped establish Nepal’s first FabLab; a makerspace for practical STEM education and digital fabrication skills. Eight years on from that first internship, she is now the founder and executive director of Fab Foundation Nepal, which she built as a place where young people can “try things, make mistakes, and learn by doing.”
“The exposure I got through the Frontier Tech pilot completely changed me,” Pradita says. “Inside and out.” In this month’s issue we’re looking to understand how someone moves from possessing the necessary knowledge and skills to confidently acting on them (even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed), and what it takes to deliberately design the conditions for that shift.
Yoda was wrong
Most innovation investment flows on the assumption that if we give people the right knowledge, informed action will follow. It’s a reasonable enough model, but it tends to get the sequence wrong. The research on how professional identities evolve suggests it works the other way around: first we begin to do, then through doing we come to know, and eventually we become.
Herminia Ibarra’s research on professional transitions found that identity shifts through doing rather than through instruction or reflection. People try out new roles in environments where failure isn’t definitive, and a new sense of self gradually takes hold. The spaces that make this possible, what Ibarra calls ‘safe havens’, are bounded enough to be low-stakes while still producing genuine experience.
We’ve written before about what it takes to create the permission to experiment in complex institutional environments, and about the culture design that makes open innovation actually work. What connects those ideas is that the environment has to be built intentionally, so that if you try something and it doesn’t work out then it doesn’t feel like a career-defining risk
When Yoda said "Do or do not, there is no try," he obviously hadn’t read Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety, which found that teams where people feel safe to attempt things they might not get right consistently outperform those where they don’t, and that’s down to the fact that when the fear of looking incompetent goes away, people try more things and they learn faster.
Deliberately designing for identity
The FCDO-funded Frontier Tech Hub describes its body of work as “a dataset on how to design the conditions for human innovation at scale,” and in its ten years of existence it has generated a lot of evidence. By their assessment, the most durable outcomes point away from the technical and towards something harder to measure and more behavioural.
Deliberately designing for identity means thinking about it from the start. For example, it’s no accident that the Hub called its FCDO staff participants ‘Pioneers’ before they’d really proven themselves as such. The title was doing the work of signalling that this was a space where that identity was available to them. It also means putting people in real work rather than simulated exercises, and maintaining institutional backing even when a pilot surprises you once it hits the real world.
Brink has been part of the Frontier Tech Hub for ten years, and if there’s one thing that time has taught us, it’s that becoming an innovator is something you grow into. And for people to grow they need the right conditions, the most important of which is simply the freedom to get on with doing.
This month’s mystery links
Your reward for reading down this far…
There are now 1,717 of you. In 1717, an 11-year-old Benjamin Franklin invented swim fins. And he did it without training or permission, just a kid who wanted to move faster and figured out how (in this instance, by attaching 10-inch long wooden paddles to his hands).
If you know someone with that same ‘just try it’ instinct, share this with them: